MIT has done it again. After the MIT courseware and open source courses online, now it has created a space for researchers on Dspace which was “built to save, share, and search MIT’s digital research materials”. It even has theses collections. That is a fantastic resource.

Center for History and New Media. It also has several projects, one of them is Project Zotera [to help save and organize your bibliography]. Another is providing digital tools for research, and a third for online curricula. It even has a search tool called Syllabus Finder!

Influence and reputation – and to add Howard Rheingold’s infotension… those are the new buzzwords around. Very interesting and intriguing concepts. Wish I was at the Future of Influence Summit! what a great lineup of speakers and intriguing ideas!

What are they?

Influence: simply put, according to my understanding of that new term, influence relates to who is influential now. Before the digital age, media such as newspapers and power and wealth all created influence, hence wielded political power and also affected how society worked and changed. Now, influence is based on blogs, Twitter and new media that is created by the masses. This is affecting politics, society and also economics and marketing strategies. They are called the Influentials or Influencers.

“Increasingly, we primarily find content through aggregated influence. In other words, influencers use Twitter, blog, Delicious, Digg, Reddit etc. to highlight the content they find most interesting. Collectively these influencers make this content highly visible, driving at times massive traffic to articles.” [Ross Dawson]

“Social media is all about human relationships, about how we shape our view of the world based on our peer communication. The extraordinary breadth of information and opinion that we are exposed to today, combined with the ability to converse, means our own opinions are often driven more by peers than traditional sources.

In fact this shift to the social means that media is becoming far more about peer influence than information and reporting.” [Ross Dawson]

Reputation: how influential you are depends on your reputation and credibility. It is now known as the Whuffie which is “the measure of reputation used in Cory Doctorow’s sci-fi novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Since we don’t have any other good words for describing collectively assessed reputation, whuffie has gained traction as a description of this phenomenon.”
Read: The Whuffie Factor and watch the video here.

Infotention: “a combination of ways of thinking and digital tools such as intelligence dashboards, news radars, and info-filters. A combination of attention, information, and intention. Applied infotention. Trained and untrained infotention. And especially mindful infotention” [this is the link to the announcement of the new term] and this is Howard’s concept map of the idea.

I was asked to make a presentation at Pine Manor College in Brookline on August 27th. The meeting was a collaborative meeting between faculty from New England Institute of Art and Pine Manor. I talked about communicating with digital natives. It was more of a lively discussion and it was GREAT to talk to peers since we all are basically the digital immigrants. 🙂